Irion County ISD December 10 2025
- G. Noelke
- Dec 11, 2025
- 5 min read
Agenda Analysis | Meeting Review | Meeting Documents | Commentary | Last Meeting
A. Agenda Analysis
Financial integrity, item 5: State law requires that all school districts must meet certain standards for financial reporting. See here at the TEA website for this year's rankings. Note that when one digs deeper to find individual district performance that the TEA website doesn't allow for a search for a specific district. Pages and pages would have to be individually searched to locate "Irion County ISD". Expect the district to pass and even attain the "Superior" rating. Supt. Moore has a degree in business if I recall correctly, and her financial officer, Ms. Lakey, seems to be doing well on the school board meeting side of things. Overall, some 98% of districts pass. I don't put a lot of stock in the rating. As I pointed out last year here at 1 e, none of this has anything to do with managing and reporting on bond funds. So, the Board under previous leadership went unscathed for having a six figure bond deficit with the 2019 bonds, and as I recently wrote here at C 3, the Board never made public its audit of the construction manager. So, bringing this forward, if you toss in the 2024 bond funds with the 2024-25 revenue into one pot, roughly 60-70% of the funds are not evaluated as part of the Financial Integrity Rating System of Texas. The Texas Legislature needs to get back to addressing public school bond finance reform. It started to study the issue during an interim charge in 2022, but they were diverted by the Uvalde school shooting. Billions of state tax dollars are being transferred to companies like Parkhill and Gallgher, without any meaningful oversight of their effectiveness or the real need for the capital improvements.
Pending construction projects, item 6: This is the stock placeholder language to allow the Board to take up bond project spending. I don't know what is up next, but with the flood control structure under construction, in time the City and District are going to come to an agreement on how to use the alley joining 5th and 4th streets. The water from the new transportation facility is planned to go down that alley.
The rest, items 7-12: These are standard items, which I've covered ad nauseum in many other posts. But, their repeated place on the agenda should not detract from their importance. I will cover them below in Meeting Review if anything rises to the top.
B. Meeting Review
Financial Integrity, item 5: Sure enough, yep, the District received an A, Superior. The larger picture is that the folks handling the money are honest. That's worth knowing and not taking for granted.
Construction, item 6: No new business here.
Admin Reports, item 7: a. Hellas and the new track: The District is ramping up their efforts to get Hellas to correct problems with the new track around the new field. (Do a word search for Hellas in the search box above to get the larger Hellas coverage.) Apparently there are a number of issues with the proper install of the track, not the field, that have yet to be corrected and the District is quite disappointed...to the level of with holding final payment kind of disappointed. Apparently the Hellas sub who put in the track still hasn't gotten it right... b. Still no lost treasure or time capsule: A covered sheet of metal and large hole underneath was discovered by the construction team...and turned out to be...an abandoned...septic. The systems in Mertzon through the 70's until the City waste water plant was installed were just that... a hole in the ground covered by sheet metal. Folks just simply knew never, ever walk on that metal. Best keep this under wraps...TCEQ probably has regulations for re-fill of old systems. I mean, its 2025 after all. c. Enough already: Supt. Moore reported on the bathroom legislation part of SB 8. Look, if the Texas Legislature has the time and inclination to regulate bathroom and gender issues, they are missing the point. How about letting Superintendents, principals and teachers manage the bathrooms and leave it there? (When you attend these meetings as I do without a child in the district, it is more readily transparent that the legislature and state leadership are running this train off the tracks. I've argued elsewhere that they are doing it intentionally, and I think that is the case here. This is overkill.)
Short meeting, etc: The meeting went under 50 minutes. There was no executive session. Mrs. Hill and Mr. Douglas were absent.
January 8: The elementary will be attending the recognition of the 161th anniversary of the Dove Creek battle with the Kickapoo Indians. I'm on the history committee of 4 or 5 folks lead by Joyce Gray on this project. This is going to be worthwhile, folks. More later.
C. Commentary
In keeping with my earlier commentaries on hunting, using an e-bike to hunt is a thing. See this month’s Parks and Wildlife article by Pamela LeBlanc, Texas Hunters Are Hopping on E-bikes to Stalk Deer, Turkeys and More. I spoke to Pam on background when she first started researching this topic, so I am glad to see it in final form.
As an aside, one reason to bike daily after, say age 55, is that it works the balance muscle in the brain. My equilibrium seems to be better with regular movement. Being immobile as we age is not helpful.
Let's not kill all the lawyers. In fact, let's hire them back. Here's an article about the Dept. of Education recalling fired attorneys amid civil rights complaint backlog. I'm so embarrassed for our educational system that we aren’t protecting the civil rights of young people. This was foreseeable and preventable.
A bay of the new transportation facility takes shape the day of this meeting. Stormwater displaced from this site will gather inside the walls of the structure being built in the pictures above.
Copyright 2025 G. Noelke
